【Just a Stranger】

Sex may sell,Just a Stranger but it hasn't tended to win Oscars in recent years. There are exceptions, course – your Carols, your Anomalisas. More often, though, sex in awards pictures tends to be small and subtle, if it exists at all.

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Think, for instance, of that tentative beachside encounter in this year's Best Picture winner, Moonlight. Or the lack of any sex at all in this year's other frontrunner, La La Land– despite the fact that La La Landwas all about the love between two extremely attractive adults.

But this year could be different, or at least it looks that way from Toronto. If the fall festivals mark the start of awards campaigning, the reviews out of this year's circuit suggest that we could be in for an unusually steamy race.

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Call Me By Your Nameset the tone for the year all the way back in January, when it debuted at Sundance and started generating awards buzz approximately 20 seconds later. The film, which hit TIFF on the way to its November theatrical release, is a story of first love and sexual awakening set in the 1980s.

In typical Luca Guadagnino fashion, sound and image collide to create an almost tactile sensation. You can practically feel the sun on your skin and taste the sweat on your lips. Much attention is paid to the way the two romantic leads – young Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) – carry themselves and regard each other, and the physical attraction between them feels immediate and electric.

It's not that Call Me By Your Nameis especially explicit (though the famous peach scene is definitely going to get people talking), but that it's unmistakably sensual. Sex is no mere byproduct of love; nor is love an elevation of sex. In Call Me By Your Name, the romantic and the erotic are inextricably intertwined.

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Sex and romance also go hand-in-hand in The Shape of Water. It takes less than fifteen minutes for Guillermo del Toro's fairy tale love story to show us full-frontal nudity and then masturbation – it's all part of a daily routine for our protagonist, Eliza (Sally Hawkins).

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It's startling at first, simply because it's so unusual. But del Toro presents this scene with a matter-of-factness that goes a long way toward normalizing it. The camera doesn't leer or laugh at Eliza, or frame her self-pleasure as something forbidden.

Ditto a later scene of Eliza making it very clear that she doesn't just love the Asset (the fish-man played by Doug Jones) – she lusts after him as well. The Shape of Watercuts away before we actually see them doing the deed, but it's frank enough to offer a quick and clever answer to the question you're already asking in your head. (Namely, "how?")

It's not just Eliza who has wants and needs, either. Eliza's best friend is Giles (Richard Jenkins), a single gay man who's got a crush on a diner waiter. The film's villain, Strickland (Michael Shannon) is a married man who enjoys some afternoon delight with his wife. Not all sex is good sex in The Shape of Water(Strickland doesn't exactly look fun in bed). But as a general concept, sex is treated as something natural and normal – this in a film where the main object of desire is a merman.

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Professor Marston and the Wonder Womentakes a more grounded approach to human sexuality, exploring the three-way romance between Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), his wife Elizabeth Marston (Rebecca Hall), and their mutual lover Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote).

The film looks deceptively conventional, in that it's designed, shot, and structured like any number of other biopics you've seen. But that's kind of radical in itself. When's the last time a tasteful period drama asked you to root for the long-term relationship between a queer, kinky threesome? Heck, when's the last time you saw that dynamic at all in a mainstream film?

In Professor Marston, kink isn't something seedy or shameful. (It's also not particularly extreme or explicit – we're talking a bit of roleplaying and rope play, maybe some light spanking, as filtered through soft lighting and breathless close-ups.) It's a pleasurable and private expression of the love between three adults. If the outside world has a problem with it, that's their wrong.

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Indeed, it's a running theme through all three movies. What's notable isn't just that sex exists at all in these films, but the kindof sex we're seeing and how it's portrayed.

We know what sex usually looks like in mainstream movies: white, cisgendered, straight, and vanilla, filtered through a heterosexual male gaze. In contrast, none of these three films feel designed to titillate straight men. Call Me By Your Namehas a male gaze, but it's quite clearly a gay male gaze. The Shape of Waterhas a female lead whom the camera treats as the subject, not the object, of desire.

And while Professor Marstonhas plenty of shots of Bill gazing appreciatively at his female partners, the film takes great pains to ensure we spend just as much time in Olive and Elizabeth's points of view. He's sexualized and objectified to roughly the same extent that they are.

Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, and Professor Marston and the Wonder Womeneach deal with marginalized sexualities in worlds where it's dangerous to be deemed sexually abnormal. In each case, however, sex itself is a source of comfort and joy and strength. It's something to be cherished and celebrated. And with a little bit of luck, this could be the year that the Oscars realize that, too.

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